2017 Ballinger Award winning home honors Mizner and Fatio’s vision

Darrell Hofheinz @PBDN_hofheinz

Tuesday

Dec 12, 2017 at 12:01 AMDec 12, 2017 at 6:35 PM

Palm Beach architect Jacqueline Albarran knows a good thing when she sees one.

And she saw one at 280 N. Ocean Blvd., a landmarked oceanfront mansion designed by Addison Mizner in 1923, a year that saw the noted society architect garner as many as a dozen commissions for lavish houses in Palm Beach.

Mizner was hired for the project by Philadelphia liquor-and-distilling businessman Daniel H. Carstairs and his wife, Viola, known as "Ollie." The architect’s work was a hot item at the time: Mizner’s design of the Everglades Club, which opened in 1919, won him raves in Palm Beach for his fanciful Mediterranean-style buildings, houses and mansions, including El Mirasol for the Stotesburys and Casa Bendita for the Phipps family.

>>PHOTOS: Ballinger Award winner at 280 N. Ocean Blvd.

Enclosed by a metal cage, the upper part of a circular staircase leading to the master bedroom can be seen from the foyer. The tiled stairs at the left lead to the sunroom and the grand salon. Photo by Stephen Leek, courtesy Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach

Mizner described the Spanish Mediterranean-style house he designed for the Carstairs as a "farmhouse of the Ferdinand and Isabella period," according to the late Mizner historian Donald W. Curl’s Mizner’s Florida.

Among its distinctive features was an unusually wide, two-story entry hall with a pair of wood double front doors on the east and, immediately opposite, doors leading into a courtyard anchored by a pool. The entry hall was wide enough "for farm carts to drive into the inner courtyard," Mizner said, according to Curl’s research.

The foyer wasn’t just notable for its width. It also had a whimsical circular staircase accessed through a narrow doorway. As it led to the master bedroom, the upper portion of the staircase emerged "high above the hall in a wrought-iron cage," as Curl described it. The arrangement allowed those on the stairs to peer through the railing at the entry hall below.

Albarran couldn’t get over that staircase when she first saw it.

"I had never seen that in a house in Palm Beach before," she said. "That is totally original."

Albarran, principal of SKA Architect + Planner, got to know those stairs — and the rest of the house — intimately, when homeowners Yoram and Pnina Apolonia Weisfisch asked her to design what turned out to be a painstaking, three-and-a-half-year restoration and renovation of the house.

Architectural legacy

Although the Weisfisches had lived there since 1992, they knew the project would preserve the home’s architectural legacy. But it would also rework parts of the floorplan so they could better accommodate visits from their large family, including their four grown children and nine grandchildren. Their daughter, Monique Bamford, was particularly involved in the renovations.

On Friday, the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach honored the project with its Robert I. Ballinger Award, which recognizes historically sensitive renovation and restoration projects at large estates.

The sunrise reflects off the facade of the Mediterranean-style house designed in 1923 by noted society architect Addison Mizner and expanded five years later by architect Maurice Fatio. Overseen by Palm Beach architect Jacqueline Albarran, an extensive restoration and renovation project at the property on Friday earned the house the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach’s Robert I. Ballinger Award, which it shared with Lido, a 1919-era house at 10 S. Lake Trail. Photo by Stephen Leek, courtesy Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach

It was one of two Ballinger Awards given this year, an unusual circumstance although not unprecedented, foundation Executive Director Amanda Skier said during the awards presentation at The Breakers. The other award honored Chuck and Deborah Royce’s restoration of their landmarked 1919 house, Lido, designed by architect August Geiger on a lakefront site at 10 S. Lake Trail. Albarran, coincidentally, also was the architect for the Royces’ project.

And like Albarran, Jorge Sanchez of SMI Landscape Architecture shared a double dose of limelight Friday as the landscape designer for both estates.

Fatio additions

The Weisfisches’ house actually showcases the work of two of Palm Beach’s first-generation architects, because Maurice Fatio was responsible for a 1928 renovation that transformed Mizner’s original floorplan by lengthening two shallow wings at the rear.

Fatio pushed the wings westward, in the process expanding a guest-apartment area on the north side. His wing on the south side was much longer, which allowed him to add a breakfast loggia and provide staff quarters above a motor court and garage.

Fatio’s south wing became one of the focuses of Albarran’s renovation, although the project touched nearly every room in the house.

Typical of its era, Fatio’s staff wing was a no-frills addition, with small, high windows on the second floor to provide light without affording many views. The wing was nearly bisected on the first floor by an open-air motor court, while the second level’s floor plan was a jumble of rooms.

Albarran fixed those problems by enclosing the motor court to create an intimate sitting room off the new kitchen. Nearby, she added French doors on the first floor to access her expanded breakfast loggia. And near the sitting room, she designed a new staircase, replicating on the landing two narrow Mizner windows that had been removed when Fatio added a breakfast patio as part of his new wing.

"I had the original Mizner drawings and we replicated them," Albarran said.

In the north wing, an area that once contained several bedrooms was redesigned by Albarran to serve as a family room with French doors accessing a loggia that houses a dining table. Photo by Stephen Leek, courtesy Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach

Borrowing details

Upstairs, she reworked the space to add spacious guest rooms with large windows. And she borrowed architectural details from Fatio’s wing on the opposite side of the courtyard as she revamped the exterior of the former staff wing.

"There was nothing architecturally memorable on the exterior of the south wing except for a chimney," Albarran recalls. "But on the north side, there were some wonderful arched doors, and large arched windows with stucco surrounds."

She also duplicated balconies from the original Mizner-designed portion of the house.

Today, the house has nine bedrooms in addition to the master suite and two staff bedrooms. In all, the residence offers 15,000 square feet of living space, inside and out, plus a new 323-square-foot beach cabana.

Re-imagining the grounds

The courtyard, meanwhile, was re-imagined by Sanchez, who had visited the house as a child. He wanted to emphasize several distinct but related spaces to foster a sense of intimacy as one walked through the property.

Original elements dating from the 1920s that were restored during the project included parts of the original courtyard fountain, the steps leading up to the pool lawn and the wall fountain at the rear. Jorge Sanchez and John Lubischer of SMI Landscape Architecture restored and redesigned the grounds. Photo by Stephen Leek, courtesy Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach

With that goal in mind, he turned his attention to the far west side of the property. He removed an outdated swimming pool and installed a new lap pool perpendicular to the courtyard itself. The lap pool doubles as a reflecting pond for a restored wall fountain.

"The fountain was there, but we had to add some features to it," said Sanchez. "But the basin itself is original to the house."

The center of the fountain also is positioned on a perfect axis with the front door. When the front doors are open, someone standing on the entry porch can look straight through the foyer to the far west end of the property.

‘Character and strength’

The lap pool fronts a broad lawn that runs between the new dining loggia on the north and the revamped wing on the south. The lawn serves a key role in the design — and not just because it provides a spot for the grandchildren to play, explained Sanchez, who worked with project manager John Lubischer on the landscape.

"The one thing missing in properties these days is, mostly, ‘voids’ — and those voids give character and strength to a property," he said. "Without those big open spaces, houses tend to become more townhomes than homes."

To the south is a seating area clustered around an outdoor fireplace. It was created by breaking into the former staff wing’s chimney, which once helped ventilate exhaust from the home’s boiler. "The chimney was such an important architectural element that I wanted to keep it intact," Albarran said.

A series of small steps — original to the house — lead down from the lawn to Mizner’s original courtyard, which is anchored by a central fountain. Its basin dates from the time the house was built and was carefully restored. New elements were designed to complement the original ones.

"We wanted to have the whole project look as though it had been there for many years," Sanchez said.

At the front of the house, Sanchez designed an unusual driveway of bricks and individual stones set into concrete by master mason Harry Gilbert. Meanwhile, a series of semi-circular grass terraces steps up to the east side of the property. Across the coastal road is a new beachfront cabana.

Other projects

The restoration included a painstaking replication of some of the original floor tiles in the grand salon, which were destroyed when crews shored up the home’s foundation. Albarran also raised the height of the salon’s main doorway from the sunroom, adding panels to the bottom of the original wood folding doors so they could be reused.

The master bedroom suite was extensively renovated. Several guest rooms in the north wing were reworked to become an expansive family room fronting the dining loggia, which seats 20 at one table. In the dining room — with its three bay windows — an artist added period-appropriate designs to the pecky-cypress beams.

Decorator Kirsten Fisk of Kemble Interiors, meanwhile, furnished the house with a mix of antiques to honor the grand public rooms and comfortably elegant furnishings that accommodate family living.

Reviewing the project, Albarran said she is thrilled that she could play a role in preserving an architectural treasure in a town where many of Mizner’s homes have long since been razed.

"It is so, so exciting," she said, "when people take these old homes and refurbish them for today."

From the front driveway, one can look all the way through the entry hall through two courtyards at the rear of the house. At the far end is the original wall-mounted fountain facing a new swimming pool. Photo by Stephen Leek, courtesy Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach